tirades
Howard Barrel’s Over a Barrel column (September 18 to 24) was a tirade, without an ounce of sober and investigative journalistic skill.
According to Barrell, the workers who embark on strikes are mad and “stupid beyond belief”. According to him, the present international and domestic economic climate should deter those who “willy- nilly” down tools.
His masterful advice is that unions should help members maintain their jobs at all costs – even if this means wage cuts for union members. For Barrell, there is no need for the jobs summit scheduled for October 30.
According to him, what we need is an export summit and getting rid of what he describes as “ridiculously protective labour legislation”.
Clearly, there is nothing new in the “advice” offered by Barrell. Over the past few months, there have been vociferous calls against actions by workers.
Also not surprising is the fact that the calls for workers to tighten their belts mainly come from those whose belts cannot be tightened around their bellies as a result of the luxurious life they live and the fat salaries they receive.
Workers are getting used to overt incitement of the African National Congress to tame the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu)and the South African Communist Party.
What is astonishing about Barrell’s piece is that it is carried by a newspaper that prides itself on being in the forefront of investigative journalism.
Also puzzling is that the author is someone who was touted at the time he joined the Mail & Guardian as a person who will bring a breath of fresh air to South African journalism.
In his article, Barrell has not bothered to investigate the causes of the strikes. He is not even asking the question of which sectors are hit by the strikes and why those sectors are being affected. What readers are subjected to are assertions, innuendo and classic middle-class prejudices, instead of well-researched facts.
More serious is the suggestion in the article that there may be an ulterior political motive on the part of the trade union leadership.
What then lies behind the present strikes? What are the causes?
It is simply this: a cashier or petrol attendant in a garage shop or garage earns a minimum of R746 a month, or R34,47 a day.
In small towns, these workers earn only R25,83 a day – a few cents more than those who work on water projects in their own communities, for their own communities in the Northern Province!
A clerical worker in the motor industry with three years’ experience earns a minimum wage of R1 489,80.
These rates are below the poverty datum line of R1 600 – a conservative amount set by university research institutes on which basis they estimate a small household can survive a month.
The picture of poverty wages is not unique to the motor industry. While the focus of newspaper reports is on percentage increases, no one mentions that these increases are off a very low base.
The low base is important if one considers that South Africa is one of the countries where a huge wage differential exists between the lowest-paid employees and the top echelons of management. For many workers, it is the poverty wage that they get that drives them on to the streets.
It is strange that the same economic policies that Cosatu has been at pains to reveal the inadequacy of are being used to argue that workers should not embark on strikes.
It is not the workers who have been pursing the policy of high interest rates, fiscal discipline, financial deregulation and removal of exchange controls.
Religious adherence to inappropriate economic policies is coming home to roost. It is leading to slow growth and a vulnerable currency.
What is interesting about Barrell’s “advice” of an export-oriented growth path, wage cuts and removal of protective labour legislation is that it comes at a time when the institutions that prescribed these policies, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, are beginning to doubt the effectiveness of their prescriptions.
Union critics like Barrell now and again raise the age-old argument that strikes are destructive to the economy. And investment. Such attacks are unjust and unfounded.
Even in countries which are sometimes used as a model for attracting investment there have been strikes recently. There were strikes at General Motors in the United States and Hyundai in South Korea.
Also to be noted is that even if there is no strike employers continue to retrench workers. Workers are retrenched not because they strike but because management is striving to be more competitive.
Foreign investors are used to labour disputes. Labour disputes are a worldwide phenomenon.
Investors are interested in the infrastructure of the country, governance and policy institutions, and the skills of the workforce rather than whether workers go on strike occasionally. If this was not the case, why are foreign investors not investing in Somalia, where workers work for a bag of mealie meal?
The crisis of low growth, high interest rates and the currency cannot be attributed to workers’ actions. The commotion about high interest rates and the fall in the value of our currency can be attributed to economic policies being pursued by the present government. The Reserve Bank is using its power to set rates and control monetary policy in a manner that is not consistent with the interests of most working people.
To follow Barrell’s “advice” to repeal or suspend labour laws is not only unwise; it goes against recent studies showing that South Africa’s labour market is not as inflexible as it is claimed to be. Such measures will be going against the Constitution and they will be tantamount to a declaration of a state of emergency.
Only those who were outside the country during the 1980s can’t appreciate how unsustainable and suicidal their prescription is.
Dumisa Ntuli is the information officer of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa